by Jill Jonnes
The Otis Company proposed a design of double-decked elevators that, because of the unusual incline, would operate on regular rail sections. The motive power was to be the usual hydraulic cylinder sunk in the ground and moved by water pressure. Steam engines would pump Seine river water up to a large reservoir on the second platform. When that reservoir’s water began to flow back to the ground, it would power the cylinders, activating a block and tackle that would enable the counterweighted elevators to go up and down, as controlled by the elevator operator. When Hall had first presented the Otis plans, Eiffel and the commission felt uncomfortable with the fact that the elevators would be pulled by cables from the top, rather than pushed from the bottom, as was the European system. The method simply seemed less safe, when safety was paramount.
The fair commissioners and all Paris still remembered with a shudder the Baroness de Schack’s dreadful death a decade earlier, when the ascending elevator in the Grand Hôtel malfunctioned, plummeting like a stone from the top floor to the basement. Eiffel accordingly demanded “a device that permitted the car to be lowered by hand, even after failure of all the hoisting cables,” and when Hall balked at this feature, Eiffel then insisted that the Otis Company’s chief engineer, Thomas E. Brown, Jr., come over from the United States to confer with him.
Safety, speed, and quality were characteristics on which Otis Brothers and Company of New York prided itself, but above all, safety. If an Otis elevator’s hoisting cables broke or stretched out, powerful leaf springs were released, causing the brake shoes to grip the rails, thus bringing the falling car to a gradual halt. All who followed the history of elevators could cite the famous moment in 1854 when firm founder Elisha G. Otis dramatically demonstrated “the perfect safety of his elevator by cutting the hoisting rope of a suspended platform on which he himself stood.” As the platform came to a gentle stop, Mr. Otis declared to his astonished audience, “All safe, gentlemen!” But almost four decades of established Otis safety were not sufficiently reassuring for Eiffel and the commission.
By the time Mr. Thomas E. Brown, Jr., of Otis had arrived in Paris on Monday evening, January 23, 1888, relations between Eiffel and the firm were already strained. Brown informed New York that it had taken two days just to hear from Eiffel, who then said he could not meet with him until Saturday. “Meantime,” wrote Brown, “we examined the Tower, and I saw at once that the bracing as constructed would not be sufficiently strong to sustain the cylinders in the position assigned to them by our plans, but I thought that a small matter of detail, which could be changed.” During their meeting that Saturday, there was much discussion about how best to accommodate the Otis elevators to recent changes in the curved legs, and whether Eiffel would have to eliminate stairways in those two legs, a measure he preferred not to take. Brown felt this could all be worked out.
But the next issue presented far greater conflicts, as “Eiffel stated that he had not much faith in the safeties we had shown.” Perhaps worse, for the first time Eiffel indicated that the fair commission, which had yet to approve the final Otis contract, would be satisfied only with “a device known as the rack and pinion safety that was used to some extent on European cog railways. . . . The serious shortcomings of the rack and pinion were its great noisiness and the limitation it imposed on hoisting speed.” (Cog railroads, in use in the mountains for more than a quarter century, featured a cog wheel, or pinion, that meshed with a toothed rack rail, usually set between the running rails, as it rolled laboriously up and down steep gradients.) But Eiffel and the commission liked this device because if all the elevator hoisting cables failed, the rack and pinion would allow the car to be safely lowered to the ground by hand.
Brown, an expert in elevator engineering, was appalled at the pointless hobbling of their machines, which would create noise, drag, and jarring as the elevators traveled up and down. “On Monday,” Brown told his bosses in a twelve-page memo, “I reported to [Eiffel engineer] Mr. Koechlin that I would return to N.Y. on the next steamer, and lay the matter before the Co.; and that if they saw fit to make modified plans, the same would be sent to Mr. Eiffel. . . . In other words, it would be fatal to our projects to present [to the commission] the plans as they then were. . . . I got the impression that Mr. Eiffel and the Commission were at loggerheads.”
In mid-February one top Otis executive read Brown’s report and counseled president Charles Otis to stand resolute on the rack-and-pinion issue. “I should favor giving up the whole matter rather than allying ourselves with any such abortion. It certainly would be a serious damage to our elevator business in all Europe, and we would be the laughingstock of the world, for putting up such a contrivance.” Worse yet, if Otis agreed to the design of such elevators and the machines failed, they would be “criticized by the public and the press as an American failure, [and] we would of course exceedingly regret that we had ever had anything to do with it.” The French finally backed down only after the Otis officials informed Eiffel that if he and the commission insisted on rack-and-pinion safeties, they would withdraw from the contract.
Meanwhile, Eiffel had also decided once again to modify slightly the tower’s legs, which of course meant further alterations to the elevator designs. As the Otis people later bitterly complained, “You forget that when the matter was first brought to our attention, the formation of the legs of the tower was different from that finally adopted, and that we wrought and substantially completed the engineering elements of the difficulty as then presented; subsequently you changed this form,—making an abrupt bend in the [interior of the] legs, and thereby not only rendering much of our past study and labor useless, but by such a change greatly adding to the engineering difficulties to be overcome.” About this same time, Eiffel and the commission, examining their man Backmann’s second effort to design an elevator serving the top, realized he was no connoisseur of elevators. In mid-1888, they had rejected his plans, which included the worrisome novelty of an electric motor, and fired him.
With just one year until the fair and Backmann dismissed, Eiffel had to find another provider for the elevator to the top. The problem, in this age before electric motors were the norm, was the sheer footage to be ascended: 525 feet. Eiffel turned to an old classmate, Léon Édoux, an elevator inventor and magnate who had installed a very successful 230-foot elevator in the Trocadéro Palace across the Seine. Édoux came up with “an ingenious modification. . . . The run was divided into two equal sections, each of 262 feet, and two cars were used.” When one was going up to the interim platform where you changed for the final ride to the top, the other was coming down, and so no other weights were needed than the cars themselves. “When these two elevators were in operation, water was admitted to the two cylinders [that provided power] from a tank on the third platform. The resultant hydraulic head was sufficient to force out the rams and raise the upper car.”
Even as Gustave Eiffel and Mr. Otis were quarreling, James Gordon Bennett and his faithful managing editor, Samuel Chamberlain, were perfecting the European version of The New York Herald. They engaged in all sorts of clever promotional stunts, including creating a special summary of the week’s news distributed to every passenger on steamships arriving from the United States, a preemptive introduction to what was already becoming known as the Paris Herald. Within days of launching his new paper, Bennett floated a subtle ploy to enter the Continent’s better-off households: the offer of a free year’s subscription to “English governesses living in any English, Russian, French, Spanish, or Italian families.” He engaged a corps of society correspondents to write in from fashionable resorts and watering holes on the doings of the cosmopolitan set.
Once Bennett junior had the European edition successfully launched, he felt ready for an autumnal Mediterranean cruise on his palatial yacht, Namouna. A formidable sailor (known to his staff sometimes as the Commodore), Bennett insisted that Chamberlain accompany him; after all, the telegraph would enable both men to keep close tabs on the newspapers. One glorious s
unny morning some weeks into their Mediterranean cruise, as they approached the Greek port of Piraeus, they sighted an American navy cruiser on maneuvers. It was obvious that the two American vessels were on a collision course. The Commodore ordered his helmsman, “Keep right ahead. That ship has no right to cross my bow.” An ashen Chamberlain, also on the bridge, warned Bennett that hitting a U.S. warship was bad policy. The Commodore roared to the helmsman to stay the course. As disaster loomed, Chamberlain leapt for the helm and swung the yacht slowly around, saving Bennett from his own pigheadedness. Bennett was not grateful and within hours he had deposited his managing editor on a desolate island (though provisioned with food and water) before steaming off. Only the imprecations of his other guests persuaded him to dispatch a rowboat to retrieve Chamberlain. At the next port, Chamberlain debarked, his editorship at The Herald’s European edition abruptly concluded.
At the Eiffel Tower, meanwhile, matters were not proceeding smoothly with Otis. As the months ticked by in the second half of 1888, every structural adjustment in the interior of the tower’s legs required the Otis Company to make its own elevator design accommodations. Moreover, all the extra work had forced Otis to revise the price of the two elevators upward to $30,000, a 30 percent surcharge. Finally, Otis informed Eiffel that because of the constant changes the firm could no longer guarantee full operation of the two elevators by the contract deadline of January 1, 1889. However, Otis did assure Eiffel that all would be running smoothly by May 1 when the fair opened.
Eiffel was apoplectic, and in a bitter letter written on February 1, 1889, he accused Otis of not keeping its word and placing him in “a cruel situation.” He followed this with an angry cablegram “reserving his rights.” Why should he pay the extra charges for elevators delivered so late as to jeopardize the opening of the tower? Not long after his freezing ascent up the tower with Hugues Le Roux of Le Figaro, Eiffel received Charles Otis’s five-page single-spaced letter acknowledging the “horror of the situation”—i.e., Eiffel’s fear that the Otis elevators would not be installed and ready on time. Charles Otis, a somber man with a biblical gray beard, had been running his company with his brother since their father’s death twenty-seven years earlier. He began his letter to Eiffel contritely, expressing his regret that “you have lost all confidence in us. We are likewise embarrassed by this state of things, inasmuch as, now, whatever we tell you, we feel reasonably assured that you will not believe us.” However, Otis once again tactfully reminded Eiffel that it was his own continuing changes to the ultimate interior shape of the tower’s legs that were responsible for much of the delay, as was the commission’s effort to impose rack-and-pinion safeties.
Charles Otis of Otis Brothers and Company
Charles Otis also defended his own firm’s tardiness, explaining that its high standards were part of the reason things were moving slowly. When it came to the design and manufacture of the Eiffel Tower elevators, “we have been more severe in our exactions upon ourselves.” They were using steel rather than cast iron, and their steel supplier had “disappointed and delayed us.” He assured Eiffel that the elevators would be working by May 1 and would be ready for the great crowds, “unless unjust and unnecessary obstacles [are] thrown in our way by Mr. Eiffel himself.”
Charles Otis also wished Mr. Eiffel to understand that even the new higher price did not reflect the true cost of the complicated elevators. His firm now expected to lose $20,000 on the contract. While he appreciated Eiffel’s distress, he was himself angry about Eiffel’s “threat that you will not pay us even the pittance which it pleased you to allow us.” Charles Otis minced no words: “After all we have borne and suffered and achieved in your behalf, we regard this as a trifle too much; and we do not hesitate to declare, in the strongest terms possible to the English language, that we will not put up with it . . . and if there is to be War, under the existing circumstances, propose that at least part of it shall be fought on American ground. If Mr. Eiffel shall, on the contrary, treat us as we believe we are entitled to be treated, under the circumstances, and his confidence in our integrity to serve him well shall be restored in season to admit of the completion of this work at the time wanted, well and good; but it must be done at once . . . otherwise we shall ship no more work from this side, and Mr. Eiffel must charge to himself the consequences of his own acts.” Eiffel and the commission had little choice but to back down; the tower had to open to the public in less than six months. Eiffel had risked his own money and reputation on making that deadline.
During that same February of 1889, not far from the Otis Brothers and Company Park Row offices in Manhattan, Annie Oakley and her husband-manager, Frank Butler, were busy negotiating their own World’s Fair contract. Buffalo Bill’s longtime partner and business manager, Nate Salsbury, was using all his charm to persuade Oakley to return to the Wild West as a star attraction for a planned Paris run. Certainly, Oakley’s stage career with Deadwood Dick had proved short-lived. The traveling show had fallen apart in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, when the assistant manager decamped with such receipts as there were. Oakley paid everyone’s way home.
Now here came Salsbury, always a vision of Gilded Age elegance in his cutaway coat, fine derby hat, and fancy cane, to persuade Oakley to return to the show she had left in London with a degree of bad feelings, though she would never explain what was at issue. It was Nate Salsbury who had discovered her back in 1884 in Louisville, Kentucky, when Oakley, then twenty-four, was still a small-time vaudeville act. He had seen her practicing for her Wild West tryout in the empty arena, and afterward he had rushed over crying, “Fine! Wonderful! Have you got some photographs with your gun?” He hired her on the spot and paid $7,000 for the necessary publicity shots and posters.
Recalled Oakley years later, “When the cowboys, Mexicans and Indians got back from the parade, they were all lined up on one side. Mr. Cody and Mr. Salsbury were on the other side, and my husband and I were called upon to pass down the line, meeting all of them.
“There I was facing the real Wild West, the first white woman to travel with what society might have considered an impossible outfit.”
Oakley, who had never been farther west than Ohio, where she had grown up, loved performing and traveling with the Wild West. “A crowned queen was never treated with more reverence than I was by those wholesouled western boys.” New York City was always a great venue for the Wild West and one year, after a new snowfall, Oakley decided to get out into the fresh air around Madison Square Garden. “I had Jerry, the big moose, hitched to a sled and thought I’d take a spin around the block. All went swimmingly until we turned a corner about twenty feet from the entrance and Jerry’s bead-like eyes espied a push cart laden with nice juicy red apples. Three of his long strides and he was at the cart and apples flew in all directions. The vendor’s hair stood on end. My moose ate the apples and my $5 paid the bill.”
For Annie Oakley, the Wild West’s 1887 season in London had been one triumph after another. “Tons of beautiful flowers poured in upon me,” she recounted happily. “Books, dainty handkerchiefs, pretty lace, ties, gloves, fans and silk for a dress were sent to me.” The Prince and Princess of Wales presented framed autographed photos. “There were many receptions and teas in my honor. I was made a welcome visitor at the two gun clubs in London.” Oakley, an ace shot since girlhood, also made significant money. At a time when the average annual American salary was $500, she won $750 in a single week at various private gun-club competitions. The English upper crust, who prized a good shot, could not get enough of this demure, petite wonder who could outshoot them all.
Annie Oakley with her rifle
When Edward, Prince of Wales, sitting in the royal box at the Wild West show with his wife, Alexandra, asked to meet Oakley after a performance, she expressed her disapproval of his famous womanizing by profferring her hand first to the princess. Said Oakley, she “took my hand gently in her own saying, ‘What a wonderful little girl.’ Nor was his highness displeased at m
y daring. He shook my hand warmly when I turned from the princess . . . he said loud enough for me and the entire assembly to hear: ‘What a pity there are not more women in the world like that little one.’ ”
Was it any surprise that in March Oakley signed a new contract with Buffalo Bill and the Wild West? Paris and the World’s Fair promised to be an even more wonderful, and more lucrative, adventure.
Even as Gustave Eiffel and the Otis Company engaged in their ongoing struggles over the elevators, work on the tower itself proceeded at a rigorous pace. The crowds down below could watch as the steam crane on the first platform lifted a wrought-iron section from the ground to its level. Then the operator on a second crane on the second platform lifted that same piece up to the second platform, while a third steam crane working yet farther up then leaned down and lifted up the next wrought-iron segment. “On the highest point reached there is a steam engine working day and night and two cranes bearing a weight of 24,000 pounds, to raise the enormous shafts of iron,” wrote a New York Times reporter. “To get each shaft into position maneuvers lasting 20 minutes are required; the workers are placed on a movable floor rising with them and railed around, so that actual danger is reduced as far as possible.” From the ground looking up, the human workers were hard to discern in this whole astonishing mechanized system.
